M atthew H. E dney . Cartography

Matthew H. Edney’s Cartography: The Ideal and Its History proclaims, “Cartography deserves to die” (233). For the author, the word is so flawed, anachronistic, inadequate, and essentializing that it is, in effect, useless. He encourages us to eliminate its usage entirely in order to think about maps in more flexible terms that embrace the wider array in which humans perceive and relate to the physical world. Edney builds his case by tracing how the ideal of cartography achieved its hegemonic status. “Cartography,” he explains, “is an idealization of mapping” (26). He exposes and denaturalizes this ideal and aims to weaken its hold by exploring its historical development as it moved teleologically from the realm of art to that of science. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in particular, it emerged as a geometrical and mathematical endeavor that offered a mimetic tool of visualization used to represent the world—in particular, it...

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